Re: OT: Non-Human Phonology

>--- Rob Haden <magwich78@...> schrieb:
> > Greetings, everyone! > So it all started when I was websurfing a couple
> > weeks ago. I came across a site that speculated on
> > the possibility of intelligent dinosaurs. The author
> > surmised that it wasn't an asteroid impact that
> > caused the K-T Extinction Event, but rather a
> > saurian civilization.
BTW, I've actually half-jokingly speculated the same about the
end-of-Permian mass extinction... The basic idea there was that the
vertebrate fossil record of that era is pretty much Lystrosaurus-dominated -
I equated them as the "cows" of the civilization.


> > Pretty soon the question of language came up.
> > As a result, the sounds they made would have also
> > been similar to those of real-life birds.
>
>Agreed. It's just too 'ugly' to imagine a Troodon
>grunting and roaring; it's 'feels' much more accurate
>to imagine them chirping and rasping. This is just me
>talking from an aesthetic point of view, of course; I
>don't know the first thing about saurian
>communication.
I remember there being a discussion on lizardmen speech on ZBB once - as a
result, I have a vaguely human-like phonology sketch somewhere around,
created for the purpose of generating RPG names. I think some key point were
impossibility of labials, compulsory lateralization of coronals, and
multiple POAs (IIRC, I had five each of coronal and dorsal series,
overlapping at two points of the palate).

Of course, chirping Troodons does sound intriguing too. Bird-style phonology
offers a lot of new ideas to work with, especially for conlangers interested
in non-humanoid languages. I'm afraid I can't contribute much, but I'll be
following the thread with interest!

John Vertical